Blog on All Things Cloud Foundry

In the previous post, I demonstrated how to deploy a .NET app to a Pivotal CF instance. However, the application is only partially operational—it still doesn’t have access to a database. In this tutorial, I will explain how to configure a MS SQL DB service and connect it to a .NET app running on PCF.

Release 1.6 of Pivotal CF, a Cloud Foundry distro by Pivotal, introduced native support for .NET apps. Within the same cluster, one can now combine Windows- and Linux-based software. Working with .NET on PCF still requires a bit of additional hoop-jumping, but this tutorial series will get you pushing apps and adding services in no time.

This post is the continuation of our Golang Internals series. It explores the bootstrapping process, which is key to understanding the Go runtime, in more detail. In this part, we will run through the second portion of the starting sequence, learn how arguments are initialized, what functions are called, etc.

Warden is a container implementation currently used in Cloud Foundry. At the same time, Docker is another option to easily and efficiently manage containers. That’s why a lot has been made to enable Docker in the Diego runtime.

Here, I briefly compare Warden and Docker: their implementation, what makes them alike/different, and how they’ll work together in Garden—the new container back end that will become available in Diego.

Until recently, all custom BOSH CPIs were forks of the BOSH project. They were hard to maintain and had to be implemented in Ruby. In August 2014, the BOSH team introduced the new external CPI mechanism that has removed these constraints. The second part of our blog series on adding BOSH support to custom clouds will be dedicated to external BOSH CPIs, how they are used, and what it takes to build one.

Lattice is a light-weight, open source tool for clustering containers. Containers in a Lattice cluster are long-running processes or one-time tasks that are scaled and scheduled dynamically. Apps running in containers have to use external services, such as MySQL, RabbitMQ, etc., but if these services are dynamic, you cannot hardcode their IPs to the client.

The solution is to use a service discovery product, such as Consul, a highly available, distributed tool for discovering and configuring services. In this tutorial, I describe how an app running in Lattice can discover a MySQL service with Consul.(more…)

When using Cloud Foundry for deploying apps, one might expect that all the test suites will run painlessly and what works in development/testing/staging will work in production. However, what if it won’t? What if it is impossible to replicate those conditions in a non-production environment? Here, remote debugging comes to the rescue.

In this blog post, I provide guidelines on how to remotely debug Ruby and Java applications deployed with Cloud Foundry.(more…)

Support for Docker is one of the main advantages of Cloud Foundry Diego, but how far does this compatibility go? Is it possible to push an arbitrary image from the Docker Hub to Diego and, if not, what are the constraints? What’s going to change in the future? Finally, why should anyone want to use Diego with Docker at all?

In this post, I’ll answer all of these questions, as well as show how to customize and push the official Redis image and demonstrate how to turn it into a simple service to be consumed by other apps.

According to Diego Lapiduz—who presented at CF Summit on Monday—one of his colleagues recently said: “If you take Cloud Foundry from us, we will hurt you.” Quite convincing to hear this from anyone working within US GSA!

Still, every joke has its share of truth. Those who work with Cloud Foundry become its advocates. Keynotes and sessions delivered on the 2nd day proved that once again. Read on to learn what May 12 brought to 1,500 attendees of the summit.

The Cloud Foundry PaaS was designed to provide cross-cloud portability and compatibility. BOSH is the official orchestration and deployment tool for CF that makes these features possible. Currently, there is a set of cloud platforms that are able to work with BOSH, but it can be extended to work with clouds that are not on this list.

In this blog series, we’ll go through all the steps necessary to add BOSH support for a new cloud: from CPI implementation to generating a stemcell.

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About Altoros

Altoros is a 300+ people strong consultancy that helps Global 2000 organizations with a methodology, training, technology building blocks, and end-to-end solution development. The company turns cloud-native app development, customer analytics, blockchain, and AI into products with a sustainable competitive advantage. Altoros assists enterprises on their way to digital transformation, standing behind some of the world's largest Cloud Foundry deployments.